Sin Clavos

Saga had started going up on Thursdays.

Nobody had discussed it. There had been no invitation and no arrangement, and if you had asked any of the four of them how it started, you would have got four answers and none of them would have been the same. It was simply that after the business with the bird she had gone up the following Thursday to see whether the goat's splint could come off, and it could, and then the Thursday after that she had gone up because she had said she would, and by the fourth Thursday there was a mug on the shelf that was hers.

That is how it works up here. Nobody tells you that you belong somewhere. They just stop putting your mug away.

On this particular Thursday she was standing at the long table with her sleeves pushed up, peeling chestnuts.

It was the end of November and the whole northwest smelled of them. The sisters had traded four braids of onions for two sacks of castañas from a family down at El Tanque, and Remedios had been roasting them in a perforated pan over the fire since breakfast, and the kitchen was the warmest room Saga had been in since the summer. Tibicena lay across the doorway with his one eye shut.

He was named for a demon, and the naming had been Milagros's, and Milagros did not do anything by halves even when she did it in eleven words.

Saga had asked about it on her second Thursday, and had got, from the far end of the kitchen, without preamble:

"Guayota stole the sun. Took him down inside Echeyde ⁓ inside the mountain, inside Teide ⁓ and the world went dark and stayed dark, until Achamán went and got him out. And in that long night, while there was no sun anywhere, the tibicenas were born."

"What are they?"

"Enormous black dogs. Thick coats, eyes like red fire. They live in the caves and come out after dark and go along the barrancos howling, and they take your goats, and, if it's late enough in the evening and the person telling it is any good, your children."

Saga had waited. Milagros had gone back to whatever she had been doing, which was possibly nothing.

"That's older than the Spanish," she added, a full minute later. "Older than the churches. Older than there being anybody here to write it down." And then, a minute after that, in exactly the same voice: "And it may not be nonsense either. People digging in the ravines keep turning up the skulls of very large dogs that nobody can account for."

The tibicena in the doorway was the size and approximate shape of a footstool. He had gone white around the muzzle, he had one eye and two entirely different ears, and he was afraid of the hens ⁓ not all of them; one of them. Remedios called him Don Tibicena when he had done something well, which was seldom. Everybody else called him Cena, which is also the Spanish word for dinner, and which the sisters had chosen on purpose, and which they enjoyed every single evening when one of them stood at the back door in the dark and shouted ¡CENA! and both the dog and the entire household came running.

The Regent ⁓ who was a goat, and no longer had a splint, and had absolutely no business indoors ⁓ stood by the hearth pretending to be furniture. Eleven cats were distributed around the room at various altitudes according to a system Saga had spent weeks failing to work out.

"You are eating them," said Remedios, without turning round.

"I'm quality-testing them."

"Mm."

"Somebody has to."

"That is true," Remedios agreed, and put another one on the pile in front of her, which Saga also quality-tested.

Angustias was at the other end of the table with a chestnut in one hand and a small knife in the other, taking the skins off in long unbroken spirals and dropping them into a bowl. She had been telling a story for eleven minutes about a man in Icod who had once tried to sell her a mule with only one working ear, and she was nowhere near the end of it, and the story had already contained a lawsuit, a wedding, and a fire.

"⁓ so the brother says, and remember the brother has not been mentioned in nine years ⁓ "

She stopped talking.

She stopped so suddenly and so completely that Saga looked up with a chestnut half peeled, and what she saw was Angustias sitting perfectly still with the knife in the air, her head turned a little to one side, listening to something out in the fog.

Saga listened too. She could hear the fire. She could hear a cat washing. And a long way down the mountain, coming up the track from the Garachico road, she could hear a cart.

It was just a cart. Wooden wheels on wet stone, the slow clop of something hooved, a man's voice occasionally telling the something hooved that it was a disgrace. Ordinary. It happened perhaps twice a week.

"Angustias?"

"Shh."

The cart came on up the track. The stones on that stretch are terrible, and everything that crosses them says so: pots ring, tools clatter, sacks of anything go shush-shush-shush, and a load of empty bottles once made a noise up there that people still talk about.

This cart came over the bad stones carrying something obviously heavy.

And it did not make one single sound.

Angustias put down the knife. She got up off the bench so fast that she took the bench with her, which dumped Milagros ⁓ who had been on the other end of it, and who nobody had noticed arrive ⁓ neatly onto the floor.

"Sorry," said Angustias, already at the door.

"You are not," said Milagros, from the floor, with enormous calm.

"I am not," Angustias agreed, and went out into the fog without her coat.

The cart came through the gate about a minute later, and behind it came Angustias, walking beside it with one hand flat on the load the entire way, like a woman walking beside a stretcher.

The carter was about nineteen. He had the mule of a man who has inherited a mule, and the expression of somebody who has been on a wet mountain since four in the morning and would like this fact to be more widely appreciated.

"Cebolla sisters?"

"That's us."

"Thank God," said the carter, with feeling. "This came off the Tuesday boat. It's been in a shed in Garachico for two days and everybody who came into that shed asked me what it was, and I don't know what it is, and I want to make it extremely clear that I have not touched it. I want that on the record."

"Nobody is accusing you of anything," said Remedios, arriving with a tray, because a person who has been up since four is a person who gets fed on that farm before they get anything else.

"Well," said the carter, taking a chestnut, "I looked at it a lot."

It sat in the cart bed under a tarpaulin, and the carter dragged the tarpaulin back off the near end of it, and everybody stopped.

It was a crate. It was about the size of a very large trunk, and there was not one thing about it that made sense.

Somebody had planed every surface of that crate until it was smooth as a table top. Somebody had jointed the corners so that the boards ran into each other and locked, with a little chamfer along every edge so the light broke on it. And somebody had stained the whole thing a deep dark red ⁓ crimson gone brown at the depth of it, glowing where the fog light caught it, the color of the inside of a fig, the color of good wine held up.

And into the whole top panel of it, cut shallow and wide so that you only really saw it when the light came sideways, somebody had carved a tree.

Saga knew it immediately, because everybody on this island knows it: the fat trunk, the branches going up and out and splitting and splitting again, the flat crown spread like a hand held over something. A drago. A big old one, the kind that takes a thousand years to look like that.

It was, without any argument at all, the most beautiful object Saga had ever seen outdoors.

"What is it made of?" she said.

"Ah," said Angustias.

She put her hand flat on the top of it, the way you do with a horse, and left it there.

"Come here, girl. Get your nose on it."

Saga got her nose on it. Up close, the red went transparent and she could see the grain running underneath, plain and straight and cheap, and then she saw the first hole: a small round plug of a slightly different wood, sanded flush, set into the surface. And then another. And then, once she knew what she was looking for, a dozen more, running in pairs down the length of every board.

Nail holes. Old ones. Filled.

And then, low on the end board, half swallowed under the finish but still legible, a black stamp: a wheat-sheaf inside a circle, and the letters HT and DB, and under those a number and a country code.

Saga had seen that mark a hundred times in her life. It was on the underside of the bench outside her own front door, and on the back of her mother's seed shelf, and on about a third of everything at Querencia.

"It's a pallet," she said.

"It is several pallets," said Angustias, "and I would like everybody to be quiet for a minute."

Nobody was quiet, because Doña Fefa had arrived. She had come up the shared wall path with a basket of eggs and the specific speed of a seventy-eight-year-old woman who has heard a cart.

"What is it?"

"We don't know yet."

"It's very red."

"We are aware that it's red, Fefa."

"I'm only saying it's red," said Doña Fefa, and put her eggs down, and stayed.

"What did he put on it?" said Saga. "To make it that color."

Angustias did not answer for long enough that Saga looked up at her.

"Sangre de drago," she said.

"What's that?"

"Dragon's blood." Angustias put two fingers on the wood, very lightly, the way you touch a person's face. "You cut a drago, an old one, and it bleeds. Actual red, running out of a tree. It goes dark like that when it dries, and it never lets go of the wood, and there is nothing else on this earth that does what it does." She cleared her throat. "It's a finish, is all. People used to varnish violins with it."

Remedios said, quietly, from behind them: "There are no dragos on La Graciosa."

"No," Angustias agreed. "There are not."

"Then where did he ⁓ "

"I don't know," said Angustias.

She took her hand off it and walked all the way around it, twice, slowly, looking at the corners.

And then she sat down on the wet ground.

Saga had known Angustias for a season and had watched her carry a roof beam, argue with a hen, and lose a thumb to a seabird without sitting down once.

"There's no nails," she said, from the ground.

"You said it's made of pallets ⁓ "

"I said it was made of pallets. I did not say it was built with nails." Angustias's voice had gone strange. "Look at the corners, girl. Look at them. There's no nail, there's no screw, there's no strap, there is not one drop of glue on the outside of that box anywhere, and I have been building for forty years and I could not tell you how to take the lid off it."

Everybody looked at the corners.

The boards simply went into each other. Fingers of wood alternating with fingers of wood, tight as folded hands, without a gap anywhere you could have got a fingernail into.

"Who made it?" said Saga.

Angustias sat on the wet ground in the fog and started to laugh, and the laugh did something complicated on the way out, and Remedios came over and stood beside her and put a hand on the top of her head, and left it there.

The carter looked at all this with the mild alarm of a nineteen-year-old who has delivered something and is now watching a stranger cry on the floor of a courtyard.

"I'll want my tarpaulin," he said, apologetically, to the situation in general. "Only it's my mother's."

He climbed up and hauled the rest of it off the far end and folded it over his arm.

And there, on the end of the crate that had been facing away from them the whole time, painted in careful black letters with serifs on them, somebody had written:

PARA LA MÁS JOVEN

There was a silence of a very particular quality.

"For the youngest," Doña Fefa translated helpfully, to nobody, since everyone present spoke Spanish.

"We know what it says," said Remedios.

"I'm only reading it out."

Saga looked from Remedios to Angustias to Milagros, and she saw three faces doing three completely different things, and then, slowly, the three of them turned and looked at each other.

"Well," said Angustias, getting up off the ground and dusting herself down. "That's mine, then."

"That," said Remedios, "is not yours."

"It says the youngest."

"It does say the youngest."

"So."

"So," said Remedios pleasantly, "it isn't yours."

Milagros had already gone into the house. She came back out with a tin.

Saga, whose entire soul had come to attention, got out her notebook.

What follows is the best twenty minutes of Saga's month, and she wrote all of it down.

Milagros put the tin on the crate and opened it and took out a folded paper gone soft as cloth, and unfolded it, and held it up without saying a word. It was a baptismal certificate. It was extremely old. The date on it was a date that would have made the holder the youngest of the three by four years.

The name on it had been worn through at the fold and was no longer a name.

"That could be anybody's," said Angustias.

"It is in my tin," said Milagros.

"It is in a tin, in a house, that we all live in."

Remedios produced, from her apron, without hurry, a small stiff card in a plastic sleeve. She held it up. It was a fishing license. It was issued in 1994, it had a photograph on it that had gone entirely brown, and it gave a year of birth two years later than Milagros's certificate.

"That's a fishing license," said Angustias.

"It is a government document."

"It's a fishing license, Remedios, you have never fished in your life ⁓ "

"I have fished."

"You have bought fish."

"With a license," said Remedios serenely, "in my possession."

Angustias turned round and went into the house and came back with what she plainly regarded as the trump card, which was a school photograph. Thirty-odd children on benches in front of a whitewashed wall. She held it up and pointed at one small girl in the front row, unmistakably her, in the row reserved for the smallest children.

"Front row," she said. "The little ones sit in the front row. I am in the front row."

"You are in the front row," Remedios agreed, "because you could not be trusted at the back."

Doña Fefa laughed so hard she had to sit down on the eggs. Not the eggs. Next to the eggs. It was close.

And here is the thing Saga noticed, and wrote down, and underlined, and has thought about many times since: none of them ever once said we are the same age, and none of them ever once said we are not sisters, and none of them ever once explained why a family with three daughters would have exactly one baptismal certificate, one fishing license, and one school photograph between them, and no birth certificate at all.

They just argued about who was youngest, at great volume, with total conviction, for twenty minutes, in the fog, in front of a locked red box.

The carter had got as far as the gate before anyone remembered him.

"Wait ⁓ where did it come from?"

He turned round with the tarpaulin over his arm and gave her the shrug of a man who moves things for a living and is not paid to wonder about them.

"Boat," he said.

"Which boat?"

"Tuesday one. Comes down through Lanzarote." He thought about it. "Might've come off one of the little ones up past there, they change it about. Ask at the harbor, they write it down." Then, because she was still looking at him, and because he wanted to be helpful, and because it was the only other thing he knew: "The lads that loaded it were in a mood about it, if that's any use to you."

"Why?"

"Because they made them do it twice." He was enjoying himself now. "The fella that brought it down to the quay ⁓ stood there and watched the whole load go on, and didn't like how they'd done it, and made them take it off and do it again. And they'd have told him where to go, only he'd brought them their dinner." He laughed. "So they did it twice, didn't they."

Nobody at that gate moved at all.

"Anyway," said the carter, into a silence he could not account for, "he wouldn't let them put a rope round it. That was the other thing. Wouldn't have a rope on it anywhere. They had to wedge it in with sacks like a baby."

And he took his mule and his empty cart and his mother's tarpaulin and went off down the mountain into the fog, at nineteen, having just delivered the largest thing that had happened to that house in twelve years, and never knowing it.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"A rope would mark it," said Angustias, to nobody. "You put a rope round finished work and you've got a rope mark on it forever."

"Mm," said Remedios.

"And he fed them," said Angustias. "He fed them, and then he made them do it again, and they let him, because he'd fed them." Her voice was not quite steady and she was smiling like a woman at a wedding. "That's how he got anything out of anybody for forty years. Feed them first and then ruin their afternoon."

"Past Lanzarote," said Milagros, from somewhere. "The little ones past Lanzarote."

Doña Fefa, who had been at the eggs and had missed the point entirely, said: "Well, which one? There's the graciosa one and there's the rock ones nobody lives on."

And that was the moment. Saga watched it land on all three of them at once, in three different ways, and not one of them said his name out loud, and she wrote in her notebook, in the fog, in handwriting she could barely read afterwards: THEY KNOW WHO IT IS.

They got the crate down off the ground and onto the flat stones by the fig tree, and that took all four of them and involved language.

Then they stood and looked at it.

"So," said Saga, after a while, because somebody had to. "How do we open it?"

"That," said Angustias, "is a very good question."

The trouble with a box built by a man who does not use nails is that there is nothing to pull out. You cannot lever a lid that is not fastened; there is no seam to get a bar into; and hitting it was not, all four of them agreed immediately and without discussion, on the table.

Angustias went round it on her knees with her ear about a hand's width from the wood, tapping it with one knuckle. Tap. Tap. Tap. Listening.

"What are you listening for?"

"Empty," she said. "Everything sounds different when there's nothing behind it. He taught me that when I was thirty-one and I had never once thought about a sound in my life before." Tap. Tap. "There. Hear it? Behind here it's hollow. And here it isn't."

Saga put her ear on the crate and knocked it herself, and to her enormous delight she heard it: a flat dead knock, and then two hand-widths along, a knock with a room in it.

"I hear it."

"Of course you hear it. You've got ears." Tap. Tap. "Now. He always did the same thing, always, forty years, and if he still does it then somewhere on this box there is one piece that comes out first, and everything else is holding everything else, and that one piece is holding nothing. Find the piece that's doing no work."

They found it in about ten minutes: a strip of the molding at the bottom of one end, indistinguishable from the molding everywhere else, except that when Angustias got a thumbnail under one corner of it and pulled along its length, it slid out of the crate like a drawer, and made a small dry sound, and the entire box breathed.

Angustias sat back on her heels and held the strip of wood in both hands and looked at it for a moment.

"Hello," she said, to a piece of molding.

After that it came apart in an order, and the order was the point.

Each piece, removed, freed the next. There was never a choice about what came next and there was never any force involved. A rail slid out and let a panel drop a finger's width; the panel came away and freed two pegs; the pegs came out and the whole end wall of the crate leaned gently into Saga's hands like something falling asleep on her. Then the long sides. Then the top, in two halves, which had been held down for three hundred kilometers of ocean by nothing whatsoever except the shape of themselves.

They laid every piece out on the flat stones in the order it had come off.

And when the crate was entirely gone, there was nothing inside it.

There was no box. There were no contents. There was a heap of packing shavings on the stones where the middle had been, and around the edges, laid out neatly on the flagstones in the fog, forty-one pieces of beautifully finished dark red pallet pine.

"He's sent us a kit," said Angustias.

"A kit of what?"

"That is entirely the question," said Angustias, and clapped her hands together once, and looked about ten years younger.

There were no instructions. There was no drawing, there was no list, there was no note. When Saga said, reasonably, that surely there had to be something, Angustias laughed at her, not unkindly, and picked up two pieces at random and held them together, and they did not fit, and she turned one of them over, and they slid into each other and stopped with a small satisfied tock.

"There," she said. "That's the instructions."

It took them the whole afternoon.

Nobody had planned it and nobody suggested it and nobody went in to start dinner. Remedios brought the chestnut pan outside and set it on a stone. Doña Fefa sent word down the wall that she was not coming home. Milagros lit lanterns as it went dark and hung them in the fig tree, one, and then two, and then five, and the fog came up around the courtyard so that they worked inside a bright wet room with no walls.

And they built it by feel, out of forty-one pieces of red wood, in the dark, in November, with an audience of animals.

Saga's job was to hold things. She held things for four hours. She held two uprights while Angustias walked a rail into them with the heel of her hand, and felt the shock of it going home in her own shoulders. She held a long piece across her knees to keep it off the wet, and got a long red smear on her sweater that never entirely came out, and did not care. She learned that when a joint is right it does not need to be forced, and that when it needs to be forced it is because it is upside down, and that all four of them got things upside down constantly and it did not matter at all.

The animals did not help.

The Regent ate one of the packing shavings and had to be encouraged to give it back. Tibicena lay down on top of the pieces on the left-hand side of the layout twice, both times immediately after they had been carefully sorted. Three separate cats sat in the middle of the work at three separate moments with the specific serenity of creatures who know they are inconvenient and consider it their contribution. And at some point in the second hour the Viscount arrived, was received by Remedios, and took up a position on the highest remaining stack of parts, where he supervised in silence until the stack got low enough to be beneath him and he moved to the wall.

They talked while they worked, which is the only way anyone up here ever talks about anything.

Saga learned that Linolada had built the loft she sleeps in, and the porch her mother drinks coffee on, and Tía Anna's kitchen shelves, and the bar in Tibor's cave that three hundred people had leaned on the night the world ended, and that not one of those things has a nail in it, and that not one of them has ever creaked.

"That's how you know his," said Angustias, working. "Everything else on this island talks. Doors talk. Chairs talk. Somebody sits down in a room and the chair says ay. Not his. His work shuts up." She tapped a peg home. "Fourteen years and I have never once heard a thing of his make a sound, and it drives me mad, because I want him to have made something that creaks so I can find him and tell him about it."

Saga held her upright and asked the thing she had been carrying since the gate.

"When did you see him last?"

Nobody hurried to answer. Angustias set a rail and walked it in with the heel of her hand, and got it home, and only then said:

"January. The end of January. He came up here in the afternoon and he was going down to the coast in the morning, and he was going over to get his brother, because his brother was in Ceuta and it was all going wrong over there and nobody could get anybody on the telephone." She lined up the next piece. "And he sat in that kitchen and ate everything in it, and he said he'd be back for the almond blossom."

"February," said Remedios.

"February," Angustias agreed. "So, six weeks. That's what it was. Six weeks, he said."

She turned the piece over and put it down and picked it up again.

"And I didn't walk him to the gate," she said. "I was doing something. I don't remember what it was. I was in the middle of something and I said go on then and I didn't get up."

Nobody said anything for a bit. Doña Fefa reached over and put her hand flat on Angustias's back and left it there, and Angustias went on working with it there, and after a while it went away again.

And Saga, holding an upright in the fog, worked something out.

She knew about November. Everybody knew about November ⁓ the cave, the night the news came in off the radio and Pipaluk crossed the floor and Aaju sang; the night her own troupe counts as the beginning of itself; the night Tía Anna does not talk about and Tibor does. Saga had heard about that night her entire life, the way other children get told about a wedding.

Six weeks before he walked out of that kitchen, he had been standing behind Tibor's bar in the middle of it, turning sausages.

He was there. He was in the middle of the most famous night on this island, at the bar he built himself, and nobody in that cave had the faintest idea they were looking at the last of him, and neither did he.

Saga did not say any of this out loud. It seemed like the sort of thing that belonged to the people holding the other end of the bench.

Saga wrote that down later. At the time she just held the upright.

It was somewhere in the third hour that Linnea arrived.

She had come up to walk Saga home, because it was long past dark, and she came in through the gate at the exact moment when the four of them were at the difficult part.

The difficult part was this: two long side assemblies had to come together around a central member, at the same time, evenly, with somebody holding each end and somebody underneath pushing up, and the whole thing had to be persuaded home over about four fingers of travel with everybody working together.

What Linnea heard, from outside the gate, in the fog, was Doña Fefa saying "harder", and Remedios saying "not yet, not yet, wait ⁓ ", and Angustias, from underneath, saying "if you all push at once it will go in", and her own thirteen-year-old daughter saying "it's too big, it's not going to fit", and then a long communal grunt and a wooden thock and four women shouting in triumph.

Linnea came round the fig tree with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

The scene that greeted her was a bench.

Half a bench. Two-thirds of a bench, dark red, standing on the flagstones under five lanterns, with a small girl underneath it, a woman on each end, a seventy-eight-year-old sitting on the ground beside it laughing until she wheezed, and a goat.

"Ah," said Linnea, and lowered her eyebrows, and it must be said that she lowered them slightly reluctantly. "Helvete. What is that?"

"We don't know yet," said Saga, from underneath it, radiant.

The last piece went in at some time after nine.

It was the back rail, and it was the piece that locked the whole thing, and Angustias made Saga do it. She put it in her hands, and set her at the right end, and told her to hold it at forty-five degrees and drop it and let the weight take it.

Saga held it at forty-five degrees and dropped it.

It went in with a sound she felt in her teeth. And then the whole thing, which for four hours had been an argument between forty-one loose pieces, was suddenly one object, and it stopped moving, and it sat down on the stones with all its weight at once, and it did not so much as tick.

They stood back.

It was a bench. A long, low, plain, beautiful bench, the red of it going almost black between the lanterns, with arms, and a seat worn to a curve by a plane and not by anybody's behind, not yet.

And the back of it was the top of the crate. The panel they had all been looking at since it came through the gate, the one with the tree cut into it, had gone up on its edge and become the thing you lean against ⁓ so that the drago stood over the whole bench with its branches going up and out and splitting and splitting, and its flat crown spread across the top like a hand held over something.

It had been the lid the entire time. It had been in front of them all day.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Doña Fefa, still on the ground, said, "It's got four."

And it had.

Four places. You could see them plainly, because the seat had been shaped: four shallow dips, worn into the wood on purpose by a man with a plane three hundred kilometers away, four hollows waiting for four sets of shoulders and four backs.

Three women live in that house.

Nobody said anything about that. Not one of them. Saga looked at each of them in turn and every one of them was looking at the bench, and nobody said one single word about the fourth place, then or ever, and Saga ⁓ who had a notebook in her pocket and an entire page headed PREDICCIONES and no self-control whatsoever ⁓ did not ask.

She has decided since that this is the best thing she has ever not done.

They sat on it.

Of course they did. They sat on it right there in the cold with the fog coming through the lanterns, three women and a girl, and it took their weight and said nothing at all, and Tibicena came and put his head on the fourth place because it was empty and he is a dog and it was there.

Nobody moved him.

Later, when the others had gone in for the pan and the bread, Saga went back to the heap of packing shavings to sweep them up before the rain got them, and that is when she found the last thing.

The shavings themselves were strange. She had been picking them out of her sleeves all evening without looking at them properly, and now she took a handful over to a lantern.

They were dark. Not pine, nothing like pine; they were a deep oily brown, almost purple in the light, and heavy for their size, and when she rubbed them between her fingers they left a faint waxiness on her skin, and they smelled ⁓ she put her nose right into her cupped hands ⁓ they smelled sweet. Sweet and resinous and slightly of the sea, like nothing on that mountain, like nothing in the laurel forest, like no wood she had ever handled in her life.

She took a bowl of water off the shelf and dropped three of them in.

They sank.

Saga stood in a courtyard in the fog looking down at three shavings of wood lying on the bottom of a bowl of water, and understood that she was looking at a tree that had never grown anywhere near her, on an island with no trees, sent by a man nobody had heard from in fourteen years, and she put a fistful of them in her jacket pocket and has them still.

And underneath the shavings, wrapped in a twist of brown paper, was a small hard thing.

She carried it in to the kitchen and put it on the table without opening it, because it was not hers to open.

They gathered round. Remedios wiped her hands. Angustias, who had been talking without a break for six hours, went quiet.

"You do it," she said to Milagros.

Milagros unwrapped it.

It was a carpenter's pencil. New. Flat, unsharpened, the paint on it perfect, the kind of ordinary object that used to come in boxes of a hundred and now does not come at all.

And along the end of it, pressed deep into the soft pine, were teeth marks.

They were fresh. You could see they were fresh: the wood inside the dents was pale and clean, not weathered, not dirty, not old. Somebody had put that pencil in their mouth, and bitten down on it the way you do when you are thinking, and taken it out, and wrapped it up in brown paper, and packed it into a box, and sent it across three hundred kilometers of open Atlantic to a house on the side of a mountain.

There was no note. There was no letter. There was nothing else in the paper at all.

Angustias reached up, very slowly, and took her own pencil out from behind her ear ⁓ the old one, the dark one, worn down to two-thirds, the pine of it dented and re-dented at the end where a set of teeth had gone in a thousand times over forty years ⁓ and put it on the table next to the new one.

The marks matched.

Remedios put her hand over her mouth. Doña Fefa said something to the ceiling in Spanish that Saga did not catch and has always assumed was a prayer. Milagros sat down.

And Angustias started to laugh ⁓ properly, the huge unbeautiful laugh of a woman who has been holding something up with her arms for a very long time and has just been allowed to put it down ⁓ and she laughed until she had to hold the edge of the table, and it turned into the other thing halfway through, and nobody in that kitchen pretended not to notice, and nobody made a fuss about it either.

Saga stood by the door with the shavings in her pocket, at the elbow of the whole thing, and did not write a single word.

They put both pencils on the shelf over the fire, side by side.

And in the morning, before anyone else was up, Saga came down the ladder in the alcove and found Angustias already outside in the gray light, sitting on the new bench in her coat with a cup of something, in the first of the four places, with the old pencil behind her ear where it has always been.

The new one was in her hand.

She was turning it over and over in her fingers, the way you do with a thing you have not decided about yet.

Saga sat down next to her, in the second place, and did not ask, and they watched the fog come up out of the valley together until Remedios opened the shutters and shouted at both of them to come in before they froze.